Trekkie...

I've always been a fan of Star Trek, although I've never considered myself a "Trekkie". I don't have a costume, I don't belong to any crews, and I don't have every episode memorized. But, for the last year (almost) I've been writing Star Trek fan fiction on the internet.

I've been using Twitter for the first publishing of my story - it's an interestingly limited way to do things. You can post as much as you want, as often as you want, but you can only use 140 characters at a time. Each of the entries appears on my Twitter feed, and the little red square on the sidebar displays the latest one. Occasionally I will gather up the Twitter feeds, add a "director's commentary" and post them on a mySpace page - as well as CGI pictures a friend of my makes for me. And then, because I don't trust mySpace (they've deleted my music page 3 times - no warnings, no reasons), I take the annotated blogs and repost them in a blogger blog. Eventually, I will just create a website for the whole mess on my server - just to make it easier to read.

By being forced to write the story one sentence at a time, I get a lot of chances to modify and extend the story as I go along. I actually have several major plot points mapped out, as well as the ending epilogue already written -- but since they haven't been published yet, I can alter them as I come up with more ideas. The ending has changed several times, as I've added new "complications" to my character's life. I kind of wonder if this happened to Stephen King as he was writing "The Green Mile", or Dickens when he was writing his serials way back when. Of course, they weren't constrained by having to fit into an existing storyline, or by only using one sentence at a time. I'm also not the only person telling stories one sentence at a time, twitterlit and junkDNAfiction are just a couple I've come across.

As I said, I've been doing this for a year -- actually almost 11 months -- and I still haven't finished the first season of the original series. At this rate, I have several years worth of material to work with.